The Meiji at 150 Podcast

Workshop - Gendering War & Peace in Modern Japan

In this workshop, Dr. Barbara Molony (Santa Clara), Dr. Sabine Frühstück (UCSB), Dr. Sharalyn Orbaugh (UBC), and Dr. Hillary Maxson (Oregon) present their recent research and discuss the transwar positionality of women and children, resisting the tendency to see 1945 as a breakpoint and to instead analyze longer-term developments in years of both war and peace.

This workshop was held on March 9, 2018 as part of the Meiji at 150 Workshop Series, hosted by the Centre for Japanese Research, the Department of History, and the Department of Asian Studies, with the support of the UBC Faculty of Arts.

Lecture Series - Sherri Kajiwara (Nikkei National Museum)

In this lecture, Sherri Kajiwara (Nikkei National Museum) traces the history of Japanese immigration to Canada and introduces several exhibits concerning the lived experiences of Japanese-Canadian internment and disposession in 1942 curated at the Nikkei National Museum.

This presentation was delivered on 28th February, 2018 at the Institute of Asian Research at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. 

Lecture Series - Shunya Yoshimi (University of Tokyo)

In this Meiji at 150 Project Keynote Lecture, Dr. Shunya Yoshimi (University of Tokyo, Harvard University) proposes that a longue durée approach to history presents one possible solution to the crisis of the humanities in Japan and North America.  Noting cyclical trends in Japan's recent history, Dr. Yoshimi calls attention to multiple "scales" of history in 25-year, 50-year, 75-year, 150-year, and even 500-year increments.

Lecture Series - Marcia Yonemoto (Colorado)

In this lecture, Dr. Marcia Yonemoto (University of Colorado-Boulder) details practices of male heir adoption during the Tokugawa period, and charts changes and continuities in adoption in the early Meiji Period.

Lecture Series - Gideon Fujiwara (University of Lethbridge)

In this lecture, Dr. Gideon Fujiwara (Lethbridge) discusses the ritualization of the "Utakai Hajime" imperial poetry reading-ceremony in the early Meiji Period.  Within the context of nation-building programs carried out by the Meiji government, the inclusion of poems composed by civilians in the poetry ceremony represented an attempt to make the imperial family more visible to the people.

This presentation was delivered on 24th November, 2017 at the Institute of Asian Research at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. 

Lecture Series - David Howell (Harvard)

In this presentation, Dr. David Howell (Harvard University) argues that the night-soil economy of Edo offers a novel way to situate late Tokugawa and early Meiji Japan into the broader history of the nineteenth-century world, while at the same time challenging the tendency to essentialize the “greenness” of early modern Japanese cities.

This presentation was delivered on 10th November, 2017 at the Institute of Asian Research at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver.